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In John's Gospel John Carroll University Carroll Collected Masters Essays Theses, Essays, and Senior Honors Projects Winter 2016 A STUDY OF “BELIEVING” AND “LOVE” IN JOHN’S GOSPEL Patrick Sullivan John Carroll University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://collected.jcu.edu/mastersessays Part of the Biblical Studies Commons Recommended Citation Sullivan, Patrick, "A STUDY OF “BELIEVING” AND “LOVE” IN JOHN’S GOSPEL" (2016). Masters Essays. 56. http://collected.jcu.edu/mastersessays/56 This Essay is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses, Essays, and Senior Honors Projects at Carroll Collected. It has been accepted for inclusion in Masters Essays by an authorized administrator of Carroll Collected. For more information, please contact [email protected]. A STUDY OF “BELIEVING” AND “LOVE” IN JOHN’S GOSPEL An Essay Submitted to The Office of Graduate Studies College of Arts and Sciences John Carroll University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts By Patrick Sullivan 2016 The essay of Patrick Sullivan is hereby accepted: ________________________________________ ____________________ Advisor — Dr. Sheila E. McGinn Date I certify that this is the original document ________________________________________ ___________________________ Author — Patrick Sullivan Date If one reads the Gospel of John through a contemplative lens one can discern a very useful dynamic interplay between the evangelist’s treatment of the words “believe” and “love.” This paper will investigate this dynamic. It will begin by identifying the relevant perspectives that a contemplative brings into an encounter with scripture. After this, there will be a short section exploring John’s use of the word love, and how this understanding of love is uniquely useful to the contemplative. A similar introductory look at belief will follow, including a proposed definition for belief that is specific to its use in the gospel of John. This will be followed by a longer, detailed examination of the motif of believing in the gospel. A Contemplative Reading of Scripture It is necessary, then, to give some description of exactly what is meant here by a contemplative reading. This paper will understand a contemplative reading to indicate the following points of emphasis: First, a contemplative reading of the gospel looks for motifs of movement directed towards an ambitious and noble goal. The contemplative life is devoted to the pursuit of ever- increasing intimacy with God. Movement towards this intimacy is imprinted as a motif upon scripture in many ways from the longing of the Song of Songs to the journey motif of Luke to the challenges of the New Law in the Sermon on the Mount (Matt 5:21–48). A contemplative lens finds value in scripture that utilizes this motif. Secondly, a contemplative reading looks for clues that serve as direction to this movement and prodding to continued movement. We begin our pursuit of realization and intimacy with God with poor spiritual vision navigating a hazardous maze in the dark. It is very easy to fool ourselves into thinking we are moving toward intimacy with God when we are 1 moving toward justification of our own egos. It is also easy to fall into a static practice that is content with our latest insight into some attribute of the Divine; thinking we have found truth, our search becomes less urgent. Scripture is an invaluable tool for the practitioner in its abilities to identify these hazards and to offer perspectives for resolution. Thirdly, a contemplative reading will insist (based on the testimony of contemplatives and mystics of the past, as well as scriptural teaching) that the movement through these challenges outlined by scripture leads to an intimacy so profound that it must be called union. Furthermore, this union initiates such an earth-shaking transformation of the practitioner that it renders useless all old paradigms and lexica. “Entering the darkness that surpasses understanding, we shall find ourselves brought, not just to brevity of speech, but to perfect silence and unknowing.”1 This requires the creation of a new paradigm, a complete redefinition of self and reality, and a new reading of many sacred terms and symbols as they appear in sacred writing. A contemplative reading, then, looks for ways that the gospel seems to be forcing a redefinition of terms to accommodate this radical transformation. It is worth specifying that this paper will not limit the contemplative life to the pursuit that is undertaken during formal prayer and meditation. Nor will contemplation be understood as a purely interior pursuit. In fact, turning away from the world to a purely interior life of prayer and meditation is identified as a hazard to be resolved. Structurally, love and believing will be treated differently because of the different presentations of the two terms within the gospel. Love appears sparingly in the fourth gospel until the Great Discourse (John 1317). The treatment it receives in that section is packed and 1 Dionysius the Areopagite in The Teachings of the Christian Mystics, Andrew Harvey, ed., (Boston: Shambhala, 1998), 51. 2 revealing. Its presence up to that point is primarily noticed in retrospect: there are numerous references to the obedience that will come to mark Jesus’ revelation concerning love, but it is only connected explicitly with love later. Therefore, this short introductory piece will be adequate until the paper attempts to elucidate the dynamic between love and belief at the end. This is not the case with belief, which will require a more detailed investigation of its own before it can be tied in with love at the end of the paper. Because the narrative employs a long and dense motif around the word believe (pisteuw), and because this paper proposes a gospel–specific reading of this term, it will be most helpful to examine each occurrence of the word in the gospel, and see how useful the proposed reading proves to be in each case. If it proves useful, then it will be appropriate to examine it in dynamic relationship with John’s understanding of obedient love as this relationship comes into focus at the end of the gospel. On Love and John’s Gospel The one who answers a call to a contemplative life commits to a life of ever-deepening surrender of one’s will to God. It is this surrender of one’s will to God that forms the foundation of Christian love. Love in turn motivates and illuminates the journey. The ways that love both motivates and illuminates the journey are manifold. Love creates in the practitioner a deep thirst for union and the promise in faith that such deep union is possible and awaits the sincere and devoted practitioner. Love empowers the practitioner during the darkest, most arid points in the journey. Love subtly brings an awareness of God into the lives of those around the practitioner. Love faces and heals the wounds that are dredged up from the depths of the psyche during vigorous practice. Through a disciplined practice of constant love, 3 one can push the boundaries of one’s experience of love to depths that justify the importance that both secular and sacred writings have given it. But love is also a reality that we all experience, feel, and understand to some degree, on our own terms. It is often one of the first several words our infant ears will hear, and may be among the most common words we hear during our formative years. So we tend to assume that we can trust our understanding of love. We think that we know what love is, even if we are not able to define it as such. This obscures the ever-deepening aspect of love, tempting us to accept our current understanding rather than challenging it. Furthermore, our attempts to acquaint ourselves with Love as the engine of our spiritual quest is obscured somewhat by the combination of the importance scripture places on love, and the reluctance scripture shows to clearly express what it is. There are, to be sure, a few expositions of love in scripture, but they are very few in light of the weight attributed to love as a force in creation (both act and product). Consider the two love commandments in the synoptic gospels. They are identified in each as being the keys to one’s entry into the Kingdom of God. They are also drawn out in some way that is unique to each gospel after this identification. But there is nothing of an explicit description of what it means to love. We are told we ought to love God with our whole hearts, minds, and being. Since I believe myself to know what love is from my human experience of it, my own self-inventory might look at this command and, in all good intention, say, “Boy, yes, I really love God. I mean I cannot find anything in my heart that is against God or God’s plan as I understand it, so, I love God with my whole heart and mind.” I might even keep God in my heart and mind through prayer and inclusion of God in my thought train throughout the day, asking God to forgive the 4 idiot people who disagree with God and me, or who just cut me off in traffic. I might include God in my thoughts during my interactions with a world that just needs God to transform it to make it more like how I see the world. This sort of stasis, which insists on accepting sacred realities on one’s own terms, is very dangerous to the contemplative, though very easy to fall into, especially in the early stages of practice.
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